


Write Me a Story

by Graywaren



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:51:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Graywaren/pseuds/Graywaren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Simon had never been good with words. They hadn't come to him easily when they were spells and they hadn't come to him easily when he was just talking. Still. After all these years in Watford, there was just something he missed about stories.  </p>
            </blockquote>





	Write Me a Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [untiltheveryend](https://archiveofourown.org/users/untiltheveryend/gifts).



**SIMON**

Simon had never been good with words. They hadn't come to him easily when they were spells and they hadn't come to him easily when he was just talking. Still. After all these years in Watford, there was just something he missed about stories.  

"What are you doing, Snow?" Baz asked, coming in from the outdoors and arranging his big, blustery coat on the rack. The cold air came with him and hung around in the living room, an unwelcome visitor.

Simon put an arm over his papers. The whole table was covered of them -- full of scribbly words and messy bits where his eraser had gone through the page. "Nothing," he said.

  Baz wandered over. He squinted. "Are you writing?"  

"Sort of?"  

"Why?  "

"Bored?" He didn't really know the answer. It was close enough. He'd just needed something to do all day and it had been kind of nice, physically, to feel the graphite moving all over the page.  

"Ah," said Baz. He hovered for a moment. Baz had been hovering a lot. Then he headed for the kitchen. "I'll get dinner started, shall I?"  

"You don't live here," Simon reminded him, and heard Baz snorting from the other room. It was really very undignified. And Penelope would chide him again for letting Baz come in and do domestic things.

 _He's practically moving in,_ Penelope kept complaining -- which was true, but only until the end of the week, when he'd move into his flat in London and wouldn't be able to visit whenever he wanted anymore. 

Maybe he was writing because he was nervous. There were so many things happening at once -- the start of University, Baz leaving, moving in with Penelope. Given all that they'd lived through, maybe it shouldn't have been so difficult to get used to, but there wasn't anything he could do about that. 

He looked down at his papers, with their terrible writing all over them, then crumpled them up and tossed them in the trash.

***

He kept writing, though, even more so after Baz took off to the London School of Economics. 

He shouldn't have. He had plenty of other things to do -- Normal university was more difficult than he'd expected, and Watford hadn't prepared him as much as he'd thought it would. (He was much better at literature than he thought he'd be, but his history was awful. He kept forgetting to leave out the goblins.)

By the second week, Simon was swamped.

 "It's a distraction," Penelope told him, when he looked up from his story to complain about all the time he was wasting. "As long as you're doing something you're really bad at, you don't have to worry about all the things that you're only halfway good at." 

Simon groaned, and put his head down on the desk. 

She sounded very wise, but he knew she'd been falling behind, too. She'd developed a new habit of running her hands nervously through her hair, so that it stuck out even more wildly than before. She'd dyed it blue. 

"You should study, Simon," she told him, sternly. "If you'd manage your time better, you'd do fine, and you'd even be able to call Baz more often."

Baz was busy, too -- they had to cut down their phone calls to twice a week. Whenever they talked, he sounded harassed, so Simon tried to keep their phone calls short. 

The problem wasn't just with the classes, though. It turned out that without his magic and his Big Purpose, he didn't really know how to make friends. People didn't avoid him the way they used to, shy of the magic they could feel rolling off of him, but that almost made it worse, because now he could be completely certain that their avoidance of him was just disinterest. Penelope was probably right -- it was a distraction -- but it wasn't something he could fix by studying. 

 So even though he didn't have time, he sat in the food court thinking about his characters, and he sat in lecture thinking about what was going to happen to them, and when he got home at night he wrote it all down. Just so that he wouldn't forget. 

***

**BAZ**

Baz, for his part, was trying his best to make do with a world where there weren't any people like him. 

It had been awful to be a vampire in the World of Mages. He'd thought it might get better after he left, but it hadn't -- now he was a vampire and a Mage in the world of Normals.

There weren't even any catacombs to catch rats in. He had to go out in the city and skulk about like some sort of wretched villain from a nineteenth century novel. Last week he'd heard someone from Statistics breathlessly telling her friend about a half-man half-wild creature she'd seen swooping down a rodent infested ally. He was going to end up in a book of crypts.

And his boyfriend kept cutting their calls short.

He was supposed to be above all of this adolescent angst. He was a Pitch. Pitches -- well, Pitches whinged, sure, but they didn't whinge about feeling lonely, or weird, or unwanted. He was eating his meals alone in the toilet stalls, for Poe's sake.

It was beyond pathetic. 

Simon kept bugging him about this therapist in Chicago that he wanted him to see, and he was almost inclined to say yes, except that even the thought of talking to someone about all this garbage made his chest seize up. He'd spent far too much time stuffing all of it down. 

On Friday, after yet another drag-yourself-through-the-motions day, he fell back on his bed, which didn't even have any gargoyles on it, then remembered he was supposed to be going on Skype to talk to Simon. He exhaled heavily, rubbed his eyes, then got up to fiddle with the ambient lighting. 

***

**SIMON**

Simon was sitting cross-legged on the end of his bed, alone in the dark with nothing but the glow of his laptop and his story when Baz' voice came through the speakers.

"I can see you writing," it said.

Simon immediately threw his laptop away from himself, spitting out the incantation for the Sword of Mages. His laptop tumbled over itself-- every single one of Simon's organs stopped doing organ things -- then landed safely upside-down.

The sword did not appear.

"What the hell," said Baz' voice. 

Ears burning, Simon crawled across the bed and straightened up his laptop.

"Um," he said. 

He minimized the word document. Baz's face was there, staring wide-eyed at him. He looked a little paler than usual, but it somehow managed to suit him. Simon was fairly certain that Baz could make a plastic bag look flattering. 

Simon felt a little as if he were waking from a dream. He'd been waiting for Baz to come on Skype so that they could have their first video date, but Baz was taking ages, so he'd pulled out his stupid story to mess around with it, and then -- and then he'd lost track of time or something. Time and space and sense, apparently. 

"I repeat," Baz said. "What the hell, Simon." 

"Er," Simon said. "I was just -- you startled -- wait, did you say you could see me writing?"

"You're casting your own screen," Baz told him, drolly. "I can't see your face, but I can see that someone's eyes are a _breathtaking_ shade of blue. What are you writing?" 

"Nothing." He looked at the Skype window. Sure enough, his own screen was in the little square where his face normally went. He clicked one of the buttons on the side, accidentally muted himself, unmuted himself, took a selfie by mistake, then finally managed to get the camera going properly.

By the time he was finished, both of Baz' eyebrows were practically disappearing into his hair.   "Shut up," said Simon.

Baz grinned.

  Now that Simon was paying attention, he could see that Baz had dressed up a bit -- he was wearing a much nicer shirt than usual, black as a night, and his hair was freshly slicked back. He must have messed around with the lighting or something, because it was absolutely fantastic -- it made the angles of his face look sharper, somehow, and the darkness of his eyes richer. Apart from his pallor, he looked like a movie star. Simon was wearing a pyjama shirt, and his face was grainy and barely visible in the chemical glow of his laptop. His wings stretched up and out of the frame. 

 "You know I can tell when you're staring at yourself in the corner, right?" Baz said, and Simon flushed even deeper. He clicked the picture of himself until it disappeared. "So. How's --" Baz waves his hand expansively.  

"It's okay, I guess. It's different. Busy." Simon paused. "I miss the uniforms."

  Baz's soft laugh came through garbled by the microphone. "You would. I bet Bunce is loving it -- still top in all her classes?" 

 Simon winced, and Baz lifted an eyebrow. "No?"  

"It's not that -- she's used to being the best at everything, right?"  

"And now she's not?"  

Simon looked down. "I shouldn't even have told you that," he said. "But we didn't learn a lot of the things that the Normals did in their schools, while we were at Watford. It's not like she isn't still a genius." 

Baz didn't say anything. When Simon looked back up at the screen, he was staring at something a little distantly. Something stung a little in his stomach, some instinctual note of warning. He had bags beneath his eyes, Simon noted, but of course everyone was exhausted in their first year. 

 "Are you -- alright?" he asked Baz, feeling awkward, and Baz sat up very quickly. He shook his head. 

"Of course I'm fine, except I'm bursting to tell everyone that I'm dating an angel," he said.

Simon stared at him -- it was uncharacteristically sappy -- until Baz waves his hands in the shape of wings. Simon scowled. It was a bit of a relief, though. If Baz was poking fun at him, there couldn't be anything seriously wrong.

 "Don't joke about it. It's awful. Penelope has to spell them invisible every morning, and it never lasts the entire day. My tail fell out the other day and I didn't notice until someone asked me if I was part of a costume club." 

Baz guffawed, and Simon buried his face in his hands. "Leave me alone."

"You should join a costume club. Make some friends. You could do -- whats-it -- historical re-enactment."  

"There aren't any dragon people in Normal history." 

"There aren't any in Mage history either. Well, until now, I guess. I expect it'll be coming out in the biographies soon. What were you writing, by the way?"

Simon flushed. "Um."

"Something about sisters? And someone with blue eyes?" 

"It's dumb. It's really dumb." 

Baz shrugged. He rapped his knuckles across the edge of his laptop -- it sounded strange, like the thundering of hooves. "I've never heard of a Mage writing a story before. Isn't that funny? I suppose someone must have done it at some point, but I can't think of anyone. It's more of a Normal thing, isn't it. That's what we have them for." 

"Yeah, well. I'm one of them now, aren't I?" 

As soon as it came out of his mouth, he wished he hadn't said it. The sentence hung in the air, uncomfortably cold. Hw awful, Simon thought bitterly and a bit uncharitably, to be dating someone who was now a Normal in every single way. But that wasn't fair -- Baz had never said anything like that, except in bad dreams and in what his therapist called thought spirals. 

They looked at one another, awkwardly, until Baz shook his head very slightly. "Tell me about it," he said. "I want to hear about your dumb, really dumb story, Simon Snow." 

Grateful that the conversation was moving on, Simon swallowed. "Well. Um. It's just about these two sisters, I guess. And they've just graduated, so they're going to a Normal school. I was going to have it just one sister, but I wanted them to have someone to talk to? Anyway. They're twins. And the main one, Cath, she likes this boy ..."

"With blue eyes."

"Yeah." It was kind of stupid how nice it felt to talk about this. It was like saying a spell. And Baz was really listening to him, his eyes all sharp. It was only scientific interest, Simon reminded himself -- Mages didn't normally do this sort of thing. "His name is Levi, and he's, um. He's a werwolf." 

"Is he?" 

"But it's a secret. No one knows yet. Cath is going to find out, soon." 

"And then what?"

"And then, I don't know. Levi will do werewolf things, I guess." He really wasn't sure -- he wanted Cath to be nice to him, anyway. He'd decided that Cath was a pretty nice person. 

"Simon," Baz said. Simon looked up.

"Yeah?"

"Do me a favour." 

"What?" 

Baz jerked his head to the side. "Go turn on your light." 

"What? No. It's all the way across the room." 

"Come on. I can't see your face at all, and it's killing me. Please." 

Simon sighed. "Fine," he said, and hauled himself out of bed. Even though he hadn't been under the covers, it still felt colder. He flicked the light on as quickly as he could, then hurried back and balanced his computer on his knees, where it could hum happily and warm him up.   Baz was smiling.   "Happy?" Simon said, meaning for it to come out snarky, but he messed up and it sounded soft and sappy instead. Baz honestly didn't look happy all that often. He did now. Exhausted, but happy.

"You should send me your story," Baz said, and Simon was feeling just warm and fuzzy enough to feel like that was a good idea. "Okay," he said. "Hold on."   He messed around with the file a little bit before he managed to attach it to an email and send it to Baz. He could hear the little whoosh of it arriving through his speakers. 

***

**BAZ**

Baz had read quite a few books in his lifetime. He read them like most Mages did -- like instruction books or toolboxes, poring over every phrase for things that they could use to make things happen. Simon's story wasn't very good, tactically or otherwise. 

Still.

Mages really didn't write stories very often. He thought maybe that might be changing, now that the government was switching around and everyone was talking about Reconsidering the Role of the Normals, but it hadn't changed yet.

He'd never read a story about people _like him._

He read the entire thing in his bedroom that night, the glow of his laptop filling up his entire vision until the sky started to turn blue outside and he had to start sorting things out for school.

He liked Cath. She was stumbling and awkward and she didn't really fit in with everyone around her. He could hear Simon's voice in her, too, which certainly didn't hurt. 

Baz had never been swimming in friends, but he'd never been anonymous, either. People had always known who he was, or at least who his mother was. His professors barely glanced at him -- they probably didn't even know his name -- and neither did any of the other students. The Student Council kept sending out emails with tips on How To Make Friends, but following them seemed like lowering himself, somehow. He deleted them unread. 

He dragged himself to class, exhausted and thirsty, and dropped into the second row of Statistics, where he tried very hard not to collapse. The whole room smelled like nerves and blood. He was getting tired of trying to pretend it wasn't driving him insane. He took far more notes that he had to, just for something to do with his hands and his mind. His fingers were always cramping up by the end of the day. At least he was going to get stellar marks. 

When class finished, he hung back a bit to let the crowd dissipate, then ducked into a corner to text Simon. It was unseasonably cold outside, and the grass was covered with a thin layer of sparkling frost. _What happens next??_

He waited a couple minutes, until Simon texted back.

_??_

To Cath. And Levi. She' s just figuring out what he is. Is she going to confront him?

 _Dunno,_ Simon texted. Then, _I'll make something up when I get home from school._

 _Thanks,_ Baz said. _Wear a hat. Don't let your ears freeze off._

***

**SIMON**

Simon, sitting at the back of his lecture hall, smiled at his cellphone.

 

***

 

They fell into a sort of rhythm after that -- Simon would write a couple of paragraphs before bed and send them off to Baz, unedited and full of spelling mistakes, and Baz would bug him questions in the morning. It was fun, more so than Simon had thought it could be. 

At first, Baz seemed pretty happy to trust that Simon knew what he was doing with Cath and Wren and Levi, but it wasn't long before he started getting bossy.

The first major thing he did was to save Cath and Wren's mother's life.

Simon had written in a bit about how she'd died -- a car accident -- and emailed the chapter to Baz. As he was climbing under his blankets, he got a text. Baz rarely texted him this late at night.

 _No she isn't,_ it said.

_Isn't what?_

_Their mother isn't dead,_ Baz wrote. _She's just busy._

Simon stared at the text. It was really odd, in a way that a therapist would probably have something to say about. Still. He didn't mind making their mother alive. _Alright,_ he wrote back, and Baz sent him a smiley face.

It was better that way, anyway -- it gave him all sorts of ideas for new and more interesting things that he could do with Cath and Wren. Baz seemed happy about it, too, and after that he started arguing with Simon about other things. Some of them were little, like what flavour of granola bar Cath would like best, and some of them were big, like when he thought Cath was being too nice to Levi once she figured out he was a werewolf.

She wouldn't be so fine with it, Baz wrote. She wouldn't just accept it like it was nothing. 

It was kind of nice. It reminded Simon strangely, and slightly nonsensically, about the night they'd made the stars in their down room. 

Penelope had taken to looking over his shoulder whenever he worked in the kitchen, too, and sometimes she told him what he was doing wrong -- everyone seemed to have opinions on Cather -- and that was nice in its own way, too. They were building something. It wasn't particularly good, but it was theirs.

This went on for a while until schoolwork started piling up, and Simon let his nightly writing slip once, and then twice in a row, and then let it fall away altogether. 

***

**BAZ**

Winter came, and nothing changed except for the temperature.

Baz was sitting in someone else's house, tapping his fingers against the wood of the table. They were talking about a group project -- trying to sort out powerpoint presentations and individual responsibilities and a million other things that were going through his head like air through a tumbleweed. What he was trying to concentrate on, mostly, was keeping the rhythm consistent. 

They kept calling him _Brad._

 _I know your names,_ he wanted to say. _I barely talk to you, but I know who you are._

He wanted to tell them, _I saved the world. Can't I get a little credit for that?_

Instead, he didn't say anything at all. Their voices didn't sound like real voices. They sounded like garble and burble. They were deciding things like Chelsea was going to do this and Yasmin was going to do that and Brad, Brad could read the fifth slide, probably, and then they were looking awkwardly at Brad because everyone was quite certain that Brad couldn't be counted on for much. Even Baz could vouch for that. 

_This isn't me,_ he thought. _I can make fire jump from my fingertips. I walked into a vampire's coven and I brought me and my boyfriend back out alive._ It had been ages since he'd talked to Simon, and Simon had been busy then, laughing with someone else before he picked up the phone. He knew he was being petty, but that didn't really help. _Once I cast an entire lullaby at a dragon and I saved its life._

_I can talk. All I ever do is talk -- wrap words up in power and make them go._

He opened his mouth to say -- well, anything -- but the words died in his throat. He stopped tapping. He stood up. Everyone looked at him. "What's up, Brad?" said Yasmin, furrowing her eyebrows. 

He turned and walked out of their house and no one followed. 

He went down the road to the bus stop, hesitated, then kept on going. He could walk home. The cold stung at his fingers and he didn't really mind. It was okay. It was fine. The winter was for disappearing, everyone knew that -- he was a thing of fire and sentences that went unsaid. No one could expect any more out of him, and no one did. 

***

**SIMON**

It wasn't such an odd series of texts, and there was no good reason to worry about it, but Simon was worrying anyway.

He stood outside his lecture hall, staring at his phone. It was cold enough that the air around his mouth filled up with steam.

During World History class, Baz had written him four texts in quick succession. 

_When is Cath going to talk to Wren?_  
Is she going to talk to Wren?  
Simon you're killing me  
Call me? 

It occurred to Simon that he hadn't actually talked to Baz in a while. Things had just gotten away from him. He hadn't expected to be the one who forgot about things like that -- he assumed that Baz would do the drifting.

He checked the time stamps. Baz should have been in class when he wrote them, and Baz was extremely serious about his classes. He never texted or checked his email or anything while he was in it. 

"Hey," Simon said, when Baz picked up. The connection was kind of crappy, and he could hear music soft in the background. "Don't you have class now?" 

"Skipped it," Baz said.

Simon felt his stomach sinking. There was something really weird about Baz' voice. He sounded like someone had tied lead blocks around his words. Simon hadn't heard him sound like this since the night with the rats at the bottom of the catacombs. 

"Why?"

"Just -- sick," Baz said. His intonation was weird, and his words seemed to be sliding sideways. "It doesn't matter. Is Cather going to tell Wren about Levi?" Simon tried to think back -- the last time he'd written Cath and Wren, Wren was bothering Cath by spending all her time with her boyfriend. 

"I don't know," Simon told him. He looked up and around him -- everyone from his class was walking in a steady stream away from the building, chattering to one another. He went in the opposite direction. 

"Make something up," Baz told him. "It's your story. No -- wait, I don't think she will, yet. Right?" 

"Maybe not?" Simon said. "Baz, are you alright?" 

"Yeah," said Baz. "Just tired. I read the whole stupid thing again last night. Normal stories are always about Normals, you know?"

"I guess." 

"And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with them, just -- anyway, I don't think Cather's going to be awful about it. She's alright. It's not like she understands, but she tries." 

He usually liked to hear Baz talking about his stupid story as if they were real people, people who cared about things, but today Simon was having a difficult time enjoying the novelty of it. "Baz, you sound weird." 

"I'm fine. It's not like it's Levi's fault, right," Baz said. "He can't help it, being a werewolf. Cather will be alright with it. Even Wren will, eventually." 

"Baz," Simon said. "I want to see you on Skype as soon as I get home." 

***

Baz looked miserable. 

He hadn't bothered with the lighting at all, and he was hunkered down in his bed with his blankets thrown over his shoulder. His skin was horribly pale, and his eyes were rimmed with red. 

"You look awful," Simon told him.

"Thanks," said Baz. It came out mushy. "Really appreciate it." 

Simon stared at him. Then he took out his phone. 

"What are you doing?" Baz said. "Are you ignoring me? You got online about three seconds ago." 

"I'm checking my dates," Simon said. He wasn't really organized enough to put everything into his phone calendar, but the really big things ended up on there, because it synced up with his Facebook. "Next weekend," he said. "I'm coming to visit." 

It was probably a sign of something that Baz didn't argue. 

***

He fretted all the way up on the train. It was supposed to have wi-fi, but it barely worked. It was an hour and a half, but it was a long hour and a half.

He rested his head against the glass of the window and watched the outdoors crawl past. 

It felt, strangely, a little like the drive back to Watford used to feel before. He'd spent all that time looking out the window, mentally unfolding all the nice things that he was about to experience again. Last year, he thought about it like a treat, like something happy, but he wasn't so sure anymore. 

Maybe it was a little bit like picking up weapons. Things that would get him through the year. Watford was the best place he had to visit, but it was also terrifying, and having nowhere else good to go didn't change that. 

He thought about nice things now, too. Things he'd say to Baz. He'd make tea, probably, and they'd sort whatever this was out. He'd been imagining that making up stories about Cath was like putting together a spell, but it wasn't all that much unlike thinking up good things while you were staring out the window.

When you were on a train, the outside moving past you never looked green or blue or any kind of colour -- it all just looked like movement. 

***

Baz was there at the train station, which Simon hadn't been expecting. He thought he'd have to trudge all the way to Baz's flat using Google Maps.

He looked okay -- much better than he had on Skype, anyway. He was wearing a green sweater that was a little bit too big for him. His shoulders were sagging a little bit, and there were dark circles under his eyes, but Simon still felt the frightened knot in his stomach loosen. 

He smiled when he saw Simon, and Simon took his hand. 

"Hey," he said.

"Hey," Baz said. "I feel like you're being really dramatic, you know." 

"That's what I do," Simon said, because it was. Baz looked back at him, then looked down at their hands, and rolled his eyes fondly. 

"Come on, chosen one."

Baz's flat was in walking distance. It turned out to be a pretty little brick building, three stories high with a spindly black fire escape hanging off the side of it. Baz let himself in with a little silver key that looked too new for the building, then held the door open for Simon. 

The entranceway was cramped. It was lined with heavy dark wood, and it smelled like the inside of a hope chest. There were two doors leading off of the hall, which Baz said belonged to other residents. The kitchen was on the second floor -- Simon didn't get a good look at it, but he could see a black-and-white tiled floor and a strange dry, golden light spilling into it. 

Baz let him past all of that, up to the third floor, which had only one door. It clunked when it opened. Simon caught it before it slammed shut, and the weight of it nearly knocked him over. 

Baz turned around and waved at it. "Safe and sound," he muttered. Then he kicked off his shoes, so Simon did the same.

It was a beautiful place. Of course it was, Baz wouldn't have anything else. It was made of dark wood, too, but it felt wonderfully open. The entranceway spilled into the living room, which spilled into a hallway without a door which snuck around the back of a wall with a huge painting of white birds in flight on it. He couldn't see where it led. The furniture -- a matched set of sofa and chairs, a little side table with clawed feet, a coatrack with Baz' black jacket on it -- looked like it came from an estate sale. Everything was full of the same dry gold light that he'd seen through the kitchen, and now Simon could see why -- the windows were made of glass so old and thick that it warped and spread through with a brilliant network of tiny bubbles. 

Baz flourished his hand. "You can put your things in the bedroom. We'll sort them out later." 

"Thanks," said Simon. 

"I got lunch started before you got here," Baz said, which was very excellent news.

Baz showed him to the bedroom, then left, which gave him the opportunity to poke around a tiny bit. Simon had seen bits of it through Skype , but of course it was different in person. It was more modern then the rest of the house -- the walls were regular plaster, painted deep green, and although there was a heavy black brocade blanket over the bed, the frame looked like it came from Ikea. Baz' laptop was sitting in the middle of it. 

He wandered back out. Baz wasn't there, so he took a wild guess and went down the hallway that snuck around the wall with the bird painting. Sure enough, there was a tiny kitchen round the back of it, just barely big enough for the stove and fridge and a little table with two chairs on either side of it. Baz was scooping stew out into two deep blue bowls. 

Simon sat down at the table, and Baz joined him a second later with the food. 

"Did you make this?" 

"Remarkable, I know. Eat it, Snow. 

Simon did. It was awful -- he guessed that eating rats all the time wasn't great for your palate. 

He didn't really want to talk about it -- talking about things was one of the skills that Simon very much did not have -- but he'd come all this way.

He could hear the Mage's voice echoing in the back of his head, too. _The Crucible cast you together. You're meant to watch out for him._ Over the past few months, he'd been coming to terms with the fact that much of what the Mage had told him wasn't very good advice after all, but some of it was. This was. 

So. Well. Here Simon was. Trying to watch out for him.

Simon cleared his throat.

"Something's been wrong, Baz," Simon told him. Baz didn't look up at him -- he just kept staring at his bowl, pushing the stew around with his spoon. "You look exhausted," Simon went on. "And you look sad."

Baz didn't say anything. 

"I don't know what's going on with you, Baz. I can guess that it maybe isn't great. But I know you don't have to do it alone. We can do it together. That's the whole point, you know?"

"The whole point?"

"Of -- yeah, of you and me. The world's longest truce. We do stuff together. Like fight dragons. And defeat evil. And deal with, I don't know, the things we don't want to deal with." 

Baz exhaled.

"I'm fine," he insisted. "Honestly. I appreciate you coming out here. But you didn't need to." 

"Because everything's alright," Simon said, and Baz nodded. 

"Yes, Simon. It's fine. It's all -- fine." 

"Okay," Simon said. He looked at the table. He thought about weapons and stories and spells that he couldn't do anymore. He thought a little bit about his therapist, too -- about how she sometimes wrapped sideways around the things that he was worried about, so that they wouldn't get too twisted up and frightening inside his mind for him to say out loud. "Tell me about Cath, instead." 

Baz looked up sharply. "What?" 

"You've been bugging me about her for ages. You probably know her better than I do. About how she's -- you know -- dealing with Levi being a vam -- a werewolf, and things. So you should just, you know. Tell me about her." 

For a moment, Simon was absolutely certain that Baz was going to call him out on it. Then he shook his head, and exhaled heavily. He stood up, picked up Simon's bowl and his own, untouched, and brought them into the kitchen where he poured the contents of his bowl into the garbage can and rinsed out Simon's. Simon followed him in and stood, hovering, beside him.

"Okay," he said. "Fine. I'll tell you about Cath."

***

He lit a fire for them in the room full of estate-sale furniture. He didn't have a fireplace -- he cast it in the air and made it spin in a sphere between all the chairs.

Baz settled into the chair. Simon sat beside him, and Baz put an arm around his shoulders, and then he started to talk.

It was strange -- his voice was halting in a way that Simon had never really heard before, and his eyes were distant, the way you had to do it if you were working on a really complicated and subtle spell. That was sort of what he was doing, Simon guessed. 

He told Simon about Cath walking around school with a lead weight in her stomach and panic in her skin; he told Simon about Cath hiding in the bathroom to eat granola bars just so she wouldn't have to do it in front of anyone else. He told him about Levi hiding in the woods with sharp eyes, hunting rabbits so he'd always be full and wouldn't ever be in danger of hurting anyone else, the guilt crawling through his whole body, and his stupid wild love for Cath, who he could never be with, because his existence would put her in danger. 

Filling in all the spaces that Simon had forgotten about. He'd liked his story, the simplicity of it, but it felt different and better with Baz pouring his messy feelings all over it. 

And he could feel Baz behind it, in all the words of the story. Maybe it wasn't quite honesty, but it was close. More than good enough, for now.

Baz curled his arm tight around Simon, and Simon settled in closer as the firelight played warm across their bodies. Baz had always been good with words -- he'd been born in the middle of them, he'd been wrapped up in their power for years -- but it was strange to hear him use them in this way. He wasn't doing anything with them, really. He was just talking, telling Simon about himself through these people Simon had made up. 

It wasn't proof that everything would be alright, just like waving a wand, but it was a start. 

An unfinished story was always a promise.

***

**Epilogue**

Baz had never actually been very good with crowds. They smelled like blood and sweat and hunger, and they made him feel claustrophobic. Luckily, years at a boarding school had taught him some very useful methods for avoiding them. 

Baz sat in the English society's cafeteria, which was actually just a single table In a stray hallway, and a little food card that sold cookies and coffee. He was writing on his laptop. 

Things had been better. Simon and him agreed -- it was important for them to have their own space, but maybe they didn't need to have quite as much space as they'd been giving each other. Something they weren't quite as much on the same page about was that Simon still wanted Baz to see that stupid therapist of his, the one he'd have to talk to through a computer. 

Maybe someday. Maybe Baz could see that in his future. But not yet. 

He wasn't ready to talk about all the things he'd spent his entire life keeping quiet about, and especially not now that he had to keep the entire World of Mages a secret as well, but he was ready to write stories to Simon. What the hell -- there was no good reason a Mage couldn't write their own turns of phrases. He liked to fancy that he was pretty good at it, after all that Chaucer he'd had to read as a kid, but the truth was he was probably just as useless about it as Simon.

It didn't really matter. He liked reading about Cath, and Simon liked reading about his own character, who was also a Mage. His Mage grew up in a cupboard, and was probably going to save the world, because right now that was the only kind of story he knew.

But he'd learn other ones.

He was sure of that.

His phone buzzed -- he picked it up. It was Simon.

Hey, the text said. I was thinking. I have an idea about your story ...

Baz smiled. 

>>>


End file.
